The three finger salute

Hi Pals,

Have your computer ever got hung anytime during the life with them, when you are downloading, playing games or even working… ok ok now don’t look at those three small buttons on your keyboard.

Seen this pop up? "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart your computer"

Then you are very much mature to go on reading.

Like the song of Zain Bhikha “Give thanks to Allah!” you can just say once “Give thanks to David J. Bradley”. Yes you can thank him every time a software program locks up and you want to start over, every time you need to change your password or log on or off your computer.

Ya folks, that's the same David Bradley who was the "answer" to Final Jeopardy on an episode of that show's special college edition last fall. It's the same David Bradley who saved Bill Gates' derriere before the Windows operating system became the monster it is today.

Bradley is the man who gave the world "control-alt-delete."

"It was not a memorable event," said Bradley, a longtime IBM employee, speaking of that day in 1980 or '81 when he discovered control-alt-delete. "It wasn't intended as something we were going to tell the customers about," he says. "Then it turned out that this reset was a problem-solver for people who were writing the programs and writing the instruction manuals."

He's much too modest.

Would Alexander Fleming have said, "It wasn't a memorable event," when he discovered penicillin? Would Albert Einstein have said, "I really can't recall when I discovered E=MC squared?"

The original idea was simply to reset early PCs without turning them off. Microsoft adopted control-alt-delete to help ensure people powered down correctly, then to handle "administrative functions" such as the vital "end task" feature for computer software that crashes or otherwise gets stuck.

Bradley chose the control and alt keys because he needed two shift keys to make the operation work, and he chose the delete key because it was on the opposite side of the keyboard. He didn't want people to hit control-alt-delete by accident.

It's more complicated than that, of course, but most people don't have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University, as Bradley does. Bradley, who speaks at universities on IBM's behalf, is on a mission — to encourage more students to go into science and technology. He's aware that much of the growth in college attendance in recent decades is in the humanities.

"I actually have a real job, but I enjoy doing this," Bradley says. "I'm as close as you get to a rock star within IBM."

Bradley originally designed Control-Alt-Escape to trigger a soft reboot, but he found it was too easy to bump the left side of the keyboard and reboot the computer accidentally. He switched the key combination to Control-Alt-Delete, a combination that was impossible to press with just one hand (this is not true of later keyboards, such as the 102-key PC/AT keyboard or the Maltron keyboard). "I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous". He afterwards elaborated that it was made more famous due to Windows NT logon procedures ("Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on").

Have a nice day with those keys! Now back to work folks munching some candy.